From: http://juliasegal.tumblr.com/post/132386092/inside-the-bottle-on-the-set-of-i-dream-ofInside the bottle…on the set of I Dream Of Jeannie

From: http://www.kentonline.co.uk/kentonline/news/2009/june/30/rare_bronze_age_paddle_find.aspx via: A Blog About HistoryA Bronze Age paddle was discovered on a fossil hunt at Wildwood Trust, Herne Bay.There are thought to have been only six other paddles of its type found in the UK.Anne Riddell, head of education at Wildwood, and one of the people that helped with the excavation of the paddle, said: "To find something like this is fantastic and really exciting."The Bronze Age discovery was spotted on an annual Fossil Hunt on June 21. Around 50 people gathered for the hunt to walk from Swalecliffe to Longcrock.The paddle was noticed by one of the group when they saw a piece of wood sticking out of the mud.Members of the Regionally Important Geological and Geomorphological Sites (RIGS), who were also on the hunt, confirmed the find by analysing the Bronze Age sediment it was found in.In Britain, the Bronze Age is considered to have been the period from around 2700 to 700 BC.

From: http://likedreamsville.blogspot.com/2009/06/noa-noa-journal-of-south-seas-paul.htmlNoa Noa - A Journal Of The South Seas - Paul GauguinIn 1891 Paul Gauguin left France on his first trip to Tahiti. This is the journal he kept of that trip. Gauguin fell in love with the people and the way of life and eventually packed it all in and moved there to live. Eventually he returned to France but "going native" and living a bohemian lifestyle in the south pacific influenced his life and art forever. Gauguin was the original nature boy.

From: http://a.parsons.edu/~dezsoa/index.htmlNico

From: http://bebelestrange.tumblr.com/post/130967534embroidered heart by Andrea Dezso, a Hungarian artist whose unique and beautiful work ranges from tile mosaics in the New York City subways to small journals and handmade paper cutouts. Her work can be found here: http://a.parsons.edu/~dezsoa/index.html

"...Goose Lake was a wild gathering by all accounts, with acid and harder stuff openly on sale and nobody seeming to remember WTF occurred. We do know a wasted Dave Alexander played his last show with the Stooges, Iggy firing him for being too out of it. You read that last sentence correctly..."

A 1970 Michigan festival that pulled 200,000 to 300,000 fans to see the likes of the MC5, the Stooges, Mitch Ryder and blow-ins Rod Stewart and Joe Cocker? It happened although there's little about it in the history books, save David A. Carson's excellent Detroit rock retrospective "Grit, Noise and Revolution".

Goose Lake was a wild gathering by all accounts, with acid and harder stuff openly on sale and nobody seeming to remember WTF occurred. We do know a wasted Dave Alexander played his last show with the Stooges, Iggy firing him for being too out of it. You read that last sentence correctly.

A three-day festival that drew 300,000? That's big by any measure. These days they'd claims the same turn-out for a vigil for Michael jackson. The Metro Times has redressed the lack of coverage 38 years later with an excellent piece on the three-day extravaganza. Read it here.POSTED BY THE BARMAN AT 9:59 PM

After a few decades of dormancy, the phenomenon of the multi-day rock festival has returned to life in recent years, with Bonnaroo and Coachella becoming annual media events. Michigan is getting into the act with the jam-band friendly Rothbury Festival, which kicks off this Thursday, July 3, at the Double JJ Ranch, not far from Muskegon.

Rothbury promoters are expecting as many as 40,000 people to show up, an impressive figure…at least until you consider the last grand-scale rock festival that took place in Michigan. In the summer of 1970, the Goose Lake International Music Festival was held in Jackson, Michigan, and attracted over 200,000 fans. Unlike Woodstock, it didn't rain and most of those folks actually paid to get in. Despite this, Goose Lake remains an obscure footnote in Midwestern rock history, the big show that hardly anyone outside Michigan has heard about.

The Goose Lake festival was the brainchild of Richard Songer, a Southfield native who'd made a fortune in construction, building many of Michigan's highways, ramps and bridges. He purchased 350 acres near Goose Lake, just outside Jackson, and in 1970, Songer, then 35 years old, decided to transform the property into a park. He told the press: "It's a dream of mine to put together some place for the young people to go." With that in mind, Songer planned to build a performance venue on his property and stage a series of concerts, starting with a three-day rock festival to take place August 7 through 9.

A novice in concert promotion, Songer sought the help of two men with practical experience, Russ Gibb and Tom Wright. "Uncle Russ" was a DJ on WKNR-FM and owned and booked the Grande Ballroom, Detroit's premiere rock venue in the late '60s and early '70s, while Wright was a photographer and sometime roadie who managed the Grande. In May 1969, three months before Woodstock, Gibb and Wright staged the Detroit Rock and Roll Revival, a huge outdoor concert at the Michigan State Fairgrounds, and with Songer footing the bills, they set out to go the Revival one better at Goose Lake.

"We began by taking the rough outline that they had," remembers Wright, "which was a rectangle on a blackboard where the stage was going to go, and then fine tuning it to handle a high-energy music scenario." Wright's design for Goose Lake was meant to be permanent, and Songer spared no expense to see the job was done right, with his construction crew at Gibb and Wright's beck and call. "He brought in his crew of highway guys and they built roads; they paved the parking; they built the restroom setup; the kitchen facilities — it was like a state park for millionaires. It was beautiful."

Gibb assembled a bill of top-shelf artists for the three-day festival, including Joe Cocker, Rod Stewart & the Faces, the James Gang, Jethro Tull, Mountain, Chicago, Ten Years After and the Flying Burrito Brothers. Most of the major acts on the Michigan scene were on hand as well, among them the MC5, the Stooges, Mitch Ryder & Detroit, Savage Grace, the Up, the Third Power, SRC and Brownsville Station. The event was heavily promoted throughout the Midwest and Ron Asheton of the Stooges recalls it being billed as "Michigan's Woodstock. It was a big deal and people were excited," the guitarist recalls. "It was that great 'Us Getting Together' thing because it was very much 'Us Against the Establishment.' It was a real dividing line between the freak and the straight."

That dividing line threatened to shut down Goose Lake before it even began. Many Leoni Township residents living near the lake were already wary of Songer's plans to build a park — and when he announced the upcoming music festival, some formed the Goose Lake Area Property Owners Association. They filed suit to keep the festival from happening, claiming the event violated local zoning regulations. However, Songer's legal team kept them at bay, and on Thursday, August 6, thousands of fans began drifting onto the festival grounds, while work crews put the final touches on the facilities.

Dick Rosemont, who today runs one of East Lansing's best record stores, Flat Black and Circular, was part of the team working the festival, doing a little bit of everything. "The first day, we helped people put up tents — people who had borrowed them and had no idea of what to do with them!" Rosemont says. "The clearest thing I remember is being up on the lighting tower on Sunday." According to press reports, a teenager named Tom Neumaier climbed up onto one of the towers, and while they were sturdy enough to hold his weight ("Those towers were made of bridge steel," Wright recalls), he either jumped or fell off. Rosemont then sat atop the tower to discourage others from following Neumaier's lead. Remarkably, Neumaier was unhurt outside of some cracked ribs; as Mike Lutz of Brownsville Station jokes today: "Someone fell off a light tower and walked away, scot free! More power to marijuana!"

By Friday night, Goose Lake was in full swing, and it soon became obvious that initial attendance estimates of 100,000 fans were wildly inadequate. Dave Bernath, Rosemont's business partner at FBC, attended the festival as a fan, setting up a tent at the back of the performance amphitheater. "You woke up in the morning and there was hundreds of thousands of people there," Bernath says. "At one point you knew where everything was. Then everything changed. You saw 40 or 50,000 cars parked all up and down the road. It was chaos — you could never leave and get back. You were trapped, but it was a good kind of trapped. It wasn't like hell; it was like paradise."

Another fan attending the show was Robert Matheu, who would later become a top rock photographer and publisher of the current online incarnation of CREEM magazine. Matheu, who was 15 years old at the time, hitchhiked to Goose Lake with a friend. "We had read about Woodstock in Rolling Stone and Life magazine, and to a 14- or 15-year-old kid, that looked like the ultimate event," Matheu says. "Look at all these bands and all the freedom while you're out there in the woods! We found some other people who were camping there and we just crashed their campsite and made friends with them."

Matheu's new friends were kind enough to share some of their drugs with him as well. Drugs, after all, were not hard to find. Open drug sales were the order of the day, and Rosemont recalls a mobile head shop set up in a trailer truck, selling every conceivable sort of smoking paraphernalia. Mitch Ryder — who began his interview by confessing, "I remember very little [about Goose Lake]; I was tripping [on acid] for the entire time" — recalls, "Nobody was straight. It wasn't cool to be straight. There were straight people there, obviously, or it couldn't have been pulled off. But not many."

With an audience that swelled to between 200,000 and 300,000 (depending on who was counting), it was up to Wright and his stage crew to keep the audience occupied, and he was determined to keep the show on schedule. Sets were limited to a lean-and-mean 45 minutes, and Wright designed an unusual revolving stage set up on a massive turntable. While a band was playing on one side of the stage, the next act would set up on the other side. Once one set ended, stagehands would spin the massive turntable, and moments later the next band would be ready to go. "The phenomenal spinning stage, which I've never seen anywhere before or since!" enthuses Bernath. "The band would literally hit their last note, say 'thank you' and 'goodbye,' they spun around and the next band started within a minute — in seconds! The first band was still fading out when the other band came on! That's the way it should be!"

Many of the Michigan acts playing Goose Lake found themselves facing an audience that numbered in the six figures for the first time, and some took to it more easily than others.

"Once we saw the stage at Goose Lake, we were giddy," Brownsville Station's Lutz says. "The liberation of having a big stage and being able to move around, that was rock 'n' roll incarnate for us. Instead of intimidation, it was liberation." However, it was a different story for Dave Alexander, bassist with the Stooges. According to Ron Asheton, the band was on a macrobiotic diet at the time and Alexander had sworn off drugs and alcohol.

"He showed up with his girlfriend and he was so overwhelmed by all of it, he ended up drinking whiskey and smoking hash after abstaining for months. He was just so stoned and freaked out that when the stage turned around and there were those hundreds of thousands of people, he kinda froze like a deer in headlights. Right off the bat, he forgot the songs. He was so out of it he couldn't even play."

Iggy Pop fired him immediately after the show, and a bittersweet evening then got even worse: While Asheton and his bandmates were smoking pot in the trailer they used as a dressing room, the police suddenly opened the door and threatened to arrest the band for inciting a riot. The police interpreted the lyric "No walls! No walls!" from "Down In The Street" as a command to tear down the barrier in front of the stage.

Barriers were on a lot of people's minds that weekend. Unlike Woodstock, Songer and Gibb were determined that their festival would have a paying audience, and along with using specially stamped poker chips as entrance tokens instead of easily forged paper tickets (priced at $15 for the full three days), the festival grounds were ringed with miles of 12-foot-high chain link fence to keep gate crashers out. While some media at the time reported that the fences were topped with barbed wire and electrified, Wright says such stories were false. "There was no barbed wire — it was chain link fence, and it was put up as nice as you could make a chain link fence," he says. "We had to do this, assuring the farmers who bordered the property that our people wouldn't spill over and mess up their property." Matheu recalls: "I know other people have told me they felt caged in, but to me, at 15, this was like the whole world opened up for me. If the fences were there, it felt more like they were keeping other elements out."

Along with tales of the barbed wire fences, David A. Carson's book on the Michigan rock scene, Grit, Noise & Revolution, also included tales of widespread use of heroin, speed and other hard drugs at Goose Lake, and a dark mood hovering over the event. However, most of the people interviewed for this story didn't share such memories, although no one argues that marijuana and psychedelics were all but unavoidable.

"You kinda started wondering, it's so permissive and open, and if people are being careful enough about what they're doing," recalls Frank Bach, lead singer of the Up. "It seems like it was encouraging so much use that you hoped people weren't having bad trips or whatever. People talked about how there was a whole row of tents — here you could buy your speed; here you could buy this; here you could by that. Here you could buy your marijuana, and you could compare prices with the next tent. And in a situation like that, you wondered: Which one are the cops? Where are they photographing us?"

PHOTO: ROBERT MATHEURon Wood at Goose Lake

Though not everything was happy, most fans and musicians recall a sunny attitude surrounding the weekend. Wright recalls that Rod Stewart & the Faces enjoyed their Friday night appearance so much that they cancelled a show the next night in New York to stay at Goose Lake and hang out. But Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan cheerfully declares, "That's probably a lie … We didn't have anywhere to go the next day, as far as I understand it," but adds, "It was such fun that first night. Tom Wright was involved, and Alvin Lee was going to play the next night, so we hung around to see him. Unfortunately, the Hell's Angels took over (the backstage area) the second day." Ron Asheton also recalls a group of bikers stripping and raping a woman within his view from the stage while the Stooges were performing. But for most fans, beyond dealing with the summer heat and sun (and the odd person falling from a lighting tower), the weekend was safe and peaceful. "I didn't witness any violence," says Rosemont, who worked in the first aid tent one evening. "Inevitably, there's going to be cuts, bruises, that sort of thing. But there was nothing major that I recall."

Convincing the locals who lived near Goose Lake that all was benign was no easy task. Many Leoni county residents interviewed by reporters prior to the festival spoke as if a marauding army was on its way, and Jackson's daily newspaper, the Citizen-Patriot, printed a "Rumor and Fact" column during the festival in which reporters tried to establish the veracity of gossip phoned into their newsroom by worried citizens. The tales ranged from hippies looting a supermarket to drug-addled rock fans stealing a cow, then killing and eating it on the spot. All the negative stories were determined to be false.

In the aftermath of the festival, most residents of the community who spoke to the press said that the young people who attended the festival were polite and well mannered, but that didn't ease their suspicions. Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Bowers told a Citizen-Patriot reporter, "They were nice to us and we were nice to them," but Mr. Bowers also insisted, "I don't think it could be any worse. Dope, sex and nudity are offensive. It was a nerve-wracking deal." His wife chimed in: "We had guns for protection if they were needed. We're going to fight [future festivals] to the last ditch."

As it happened, the Bowers and their neighbors soon had plenty of help preventing Goose Lake II from taking place. Police officers — convinced arresting drug dealers in the park would cause a riot — waited outside the gates on Sunday afternoon, and hundreds of fans leaving the festival were arrested for possession. Many patrons, taking the advice of master of ceremonies Teagarden & Van Winkle, either burned or threw away their stashes rather than risk seizure on the way home. Governor William Milliken, who was running for re-election at the time, seized the opportunity to show he was tough on drugs. Returning to Michigan after spending the eventful weekend at a governor's conference in Missouri, Milliken declared he was "outraged" at the sale of drugs at Goose Lake and proposed legislation that would prevent similar events, adding "I do not oppose rock festivals, but I do oppose and will fight drug abuse such as took place at Goose Lake."

In quick succession, Jackson County legislators proposed laws that would outlaw gatherings as large as the Goose Lake festival; Michigan Representative Charles E. Chamberlain sought to launch a federal congressional inquiry into the event; Songer was indicted on charges related to illegal activity on his property; and state attorney general Frank Kelley threw his support behind proposals that would hold promoters legally liable for illegal activity at events they staged. While Songer had planned to hold another music festival at Goose Lake on Labor Day Weekend 1970, the controversy put an end to any future concerts at the park. He renamed the facility Wonderland Park and promoted it as a family-friendly destination, but even an attempt to stage a snowmobile race there was stopped by local officials. While Songer was eventually exonerated, Goose Lake was destined to be a one-off.

Goose Lake was in the headlines in Michigan through much of July 1970, but it received little coverage elsewhere. "The biggest mistake made at Goose Lake was my fault," Wright confesses. "And that was when the press showed up backstage, we were not hospitable. We weren't rude or anything, but we explained that the backstage area was for the roadies, the guys with the bands, the bands and the band's friends. We couldn't clog up the gears with 15 people who claimed to be from Rolling Stone. So we gave them free passes to the whole event, and they could get everywhere except backstage, which was the only place they wanted to be. Consequently, we did not get any coverage in the music press."

Despite it all, Goose Lake remains the biggest festival of its kind ever held in the Midwest, and gave Michigan's counterculture a chance to come together and raise their voices on a grand scale, while having some fun at the same time. As Mitch Ryder says, with no small pride: "It was a clash of cultures, for sure. But that's how change comes about. And I was involved in it.

The author would like to thank Robert Matheu, Tom Wright and Russ Gibb for their help with this story, as well as everyone who was interviewed. Mark Deming would like to hear from anyone who has photos or memories of Goose Lake; contact him at markrdeming@gmail.com.

Mark Deming is a freelance writer. Send comments to letters@metrotimes.com.

It’s hard to be weird on the internet. There are guys eating shit, people on fire, women cutting off guy’s cocks.

Ho boy.

People have begun finding what I write and dropping me emails telling me that I’m “dangerous”. I get comments like:

“Why did you do/write that?”

Or even better:

“How could you do/write such a thing? I consider you dangerous!”

It’s a statement to the blog mentality, I think. People read blogs and expect that what is written is somehow a true and accurate record of daily activities.

Well, there is that.

But, I write fiction. And this is a website, not a blawg. Blawgs invite comments. There is no comment section on my website. Welcome to something called “creativity”.

Now I’m called a dangerous writer. Why?

Well, the Easy answer? Everyone seems to be living vicariously through other people in something called Blogs. Pronounced: “Blawgs”. It’s short for Web Logs like a daily journal, I suppose.

I’m a writer. What you are perceiving when you read my website takes place in your own head when you read the words I’ve assembled together.

Duh.

I love that readers get really, really disturbed and think that I’m actually doing these things.

I like being surprised.

Well, maybe it is true. Maybe I have done these things.

I like fiction. Mostly, my life lives so weird that it literally seems like fiction. But, in writing I occasionally take liberties.

I’m a writer. Remember?

It’s sort of like eating some butterscotch pudding at a friend’s house and then having your friend tell you: “Hey. I put ground glass into your dessert. Your intestines are gonn’a shred in about twenty minutes and you’ll die a horrible death. It’s going to hurt you real bad,” and it’s the truth.

But here it wouldn’t be real because… ?

That’s right.Because I’m a writer.

I’ve written about a woman shooting a man in the face

Did I do that? Am I a woman who shot a man in the face?

I’ve written about a lunatic killing an entire family and all their guests at a party. A piece which I reworked. I originally wrote it years ago, the piece is called ‘Safari Night’

It’s on the internet. So, is it true? Did I actually viciously murder people and write about it in a blawg?

Some of what I write disturbs me. Do I stop writing it? I haven’t so far. That’s what I do. I’m a writer. I also like decaf coffee and befriending stray animals.

One of my readers wrote to me and called me a chronicler of the mundane. Look who was reading Raymond Carver, eh? If you want to say I write like Bukowski, or Ray Carver or even Hemingway, well hell go on and say it. I’m fine with that.

If my writing doesn’t move you, then I haven’t done my job. I’m

b o r i n g.

I’m fucked.

Oh.Toot Toot !

I used a bad word.

I get that a lot also.

The fat landed, smug ‘n snug with enriched, white bread crumbs, falling from the corners of their mouths (as if anything whole would need enriching), and too afraid to say cunt, nigger, cocksucker, spic or motherfucker.

But not too scared to lie about who they are.Or to lie to themselves about who I am.

Remember, these are words you will read here. The action takes place in your imagination.

The words upset you? Hey, congratulations! You’ve found your very own imagination and you’re using it to be upset at me.

I’m okay with that.

(stepping down from the speech maker’s stage – with a sheepish grin)

Do I ‘rilly exist? Who is

Father Luke?

I dunn’o.

Who are you?Have we met?

Maybe this might, then, be an introduction between us?

Sort of an illusion isn’t it, like something made up. I mean if you can’t actually see, taste, touch, hear, smell or…

Sunday, June 28, 2009

I think LA's KABC won some award with this short documentary on how punk rock is destroying families -- somehow missing the point that family dysfunction is the culprit, not Lee Ving. Nice shots of a Fear concert. This ran as a week-long 5-part special report on the KABC-TV news, and then ran alone late one night as an expanded special.

"...Captain Beefheart's Iridescent Logic was an article written by Lester Bangs that appeared in Musician #29 in 1981. Three of Don's sketches, shown below, were scattered through the article. The text was also published as Captain Beefheart's Far Cry in the Village Voice, October 1980. The sketches were not included with this version...."

This excellent article / interview was written by Lester Bangs and was taken from the October 1st - 7th 1980 edition of Voice.

He's alive, but so is paint. Are you?

Don Van Vliet is a 39-year-old man who lives with his wife Jan in a trailer in the Mojave Desert. They have very little money, so it must be pretty hard on them sometimes, but I've never heard them complain. Don Van Vliet is better known as Captain Beefheart, a legend worldwide whom the better part of a generation of New Wave rock 'n' roll bands' have cited as one of their most important spiritual and musical forefathers: John Lydon/Rotten, Joe Strummer of the Clash, Devo, Pere Ubu, and many others have attested to growing up on copies of Van Vliet's 1969 album Trout Mask Replica, playing its four sides of discordant yet juicy swampbrine jambalaya roogalator over and over again until they knew whole bits - routines out of his lyrics, which are a wild and totally original form of free-associational poetry.

There are some of us who think he is one of the giants of 20th century music, certainly of the postwar era. He has never been to music school, and taught himself to play about half a dozen instruments including soprano sax, bass clarinet, harmonica, guitar, piano, and most recently mellotron. He sings in seven and a half octaves, and his style has been compared to Howlin' Wolf and several species of primordial beasts. His music, which he composes for ensemble and then literally teaches his bands how to play, is often atonal but always swings in a way that very little rock ever has. His rhythmic concept is unique. I hear Delta blues, free jazz, field hollers, rock 'n' roll and lately something new that I can't put my finger on but relates somehow to what they call "serious" music. You'll probably hear several other things.

This is going to be a profile partially occasioned by the release of his 12th (and best since 1972's Clear Spot) album, Doc at the Radar Station. This is also going to be, and I hesitate mightily to say this because I hate those articles where the writer brays how buddybuddy he is with the rock stars, about someone I have long considered a friend and am still only beginning to feel I understand after 11 years. Which is perhaps not so long a time to take to be able to say that you have learned anything about anyone.

Meanwhile, back in the Mojave Desert, Don Van Vliet is enjoying a highly urbane, slyly witty (anecdotes and repartee litter the lunar sands like sequins 'n' confetti on the floor of a Halloween disco), and endlessly absorbing conversation with a gila monster. "GRAAUUWWWKKK!" says the big slumbrous reptile, peering out its laser-green lidless bulging eyes and missing nothing. "Brickbats fly my fireplace," answers Van Vliet. "Upside down I see them in the fire. They squeak and roast there. Wings leap across the floor." "KRAAEEAUUWWWKKK!" advises heat-resistant gila. Van Vliet the Captain nods and ponders the efficacy of such a course. They've both just washed down the last of the scalding chilli fulla big eyed beans from Venus what glare atcha accusingly as ya poppem doomward inya mouf. The Captain, Van Vliet, call him which you choose, has chosen to live out here, squatflat wampum on this blazened barren ground for many a year. Don't see too much o' the hoomin side o' the varmint family out here, but that's fine with Cap Vliet, "Doc" as he's called by the crusty prospectors hung on lak chiggers from times before his emigration to this spot.

Have you ever had somebody you idolized or looked up to as an artist?

"Can't think of anybody, other than the fact that I thought Van Gogh was excellent."

How about in music?

"Never in music I never have. A hero in music. No, fortunately."

So you didn't listen to like Delta blues and free jazz and stuff before you started to-

"Not really. . . I met Eric Dolphy. He was a nice guy, but it was real limited to me, like bliddle-liddle-diddlenopdedit-bop, "I came a long way from St. Louie," like Ornette, you know. It didn't move me."

Dolphy didn't MOVE you?

"Well, he moved me, but he didn't move me as much as a goose, say. Now that could be a hero, a gander goose could definitely be a hero, the way they blow their heart out for nothing like that."

Is that because you think that people generally do it for purposes of ego?

"Um, yeah, which I think is good because it gets your shoes tied. You know what I mean, it doesn't scare old ladies, you get dressed. So I think that's nice."

You don't think it's possible to create art that's egoless, that just flows through you?

"That's possible, I'm tryin' to do that, on this last album definitely."

Well, one thing I find is that the more I know the less I know.

"Me too. I don't know anything about music."

As reviews over the years have proved, it's always difficult to write anything that really says something about Don Van Vliet. Perhaps (though he may hate this comparison) this is because, like Brian Eno, he approaches music with the instincts of a painter, in Beefheart's case those of a sculptor as well. (When I was trying to pin him down about something on his new album over the phone the other day, he said: "Have you seen Franz Kline lately? You should go over to the Guggenheim and see his Number Seven, they have it in such a good place. He's probably closer to my music than any of the painters, because it's just totally speed and emotion that comes out of what he does.") When he's directing the musicians in his Magic Band he often draws the songs as diagrams and shapes. Before that he plays the compositions into a tape himself, "usually on a piano or a moog synthesizer. Then I can shape it to be exactly the way I want it, after I get it down there. It's almost like sculpture; that's actually what I'm doing, I think. 'Cause I sure as hell can't afford marble, as if there was any."

Much of what results, by any "normal" laws of music, cannot be done. As for lyrics, again like Eno, he often works them up from a sort of childlike delight at the very nature of the sounds themselves, of certain words, so if, to pull an example out of the air; "anthrax," or "love" for that matter appears in a line, it doesn't necessarily mean what you'll find in the dictionary if you look it up. Then again, it might. Contrary to Rolling Stone, "Ashtray Heart" on the new album has nothing to do with Beefheart's reaction to punk rockers beyond one repeated aside that might as well be a red herring. ("Lut's open up another case of the punks" is the line reflecting his rather dim view of the New Wavers who are proud to admit to being influenced by him. "I don't ever listen to 'em, you see, which is not very nice of me but... then again, why should I look through my own vomit? I think they're overlooking the fact - they're putting it back into rock and roll: bomp, bomp, bomp, that's what I was tryin' to get away from, that mama heartbeat stuff. I guess they have to make a living, though.") He laughs about the misinterpretation, but since the song is pretty clearly about betrayal, I asked: "What was it about the person in the song that could make you care enough to be that hurt?"

He says: "Humanity. The fact that people don't hear it the way you really mean it. Probably for a similar reason that Van Gogh gave that girl a piece of his flesh, because she was too stupid to comprehend what he was doing. I always thought that he gave her that as a physical thing to hold onto because she didn't accept the aesthetic value of what he was saying."

'We don't have to suffer, we're the best batch yet.' Would you care to comment on what that might mean?

"Yeah, what I was doing there was having these cardboard ball sculptures, fake pearls, real cheap cardboard constructed circles, you know what I mean, floating through that music. Actually, I was afraid to sing on that track, I liked the music so much, it was perfect without me on it. And so I put those words on there, you know they're just cheap cardboard constructions of balls of simulated pearls floating through, and it's an overwhelming technique that makes them look like pearls. "We don't have to suffer, we're the best batch yet" were these pearls talking to themselves."

As opposed to the other ones. What does mean when you say, "White flesh waves to black"?

"God, I don't know what that means. It means, it's just a, uh, it's merely just a painting, you see, that's poetic license."

I thought you were talking about racism.

"Oh, no. I don't know what to do about racial or political things. It was just a poem to me. A poem for poem's sake."

I was also thinking of when you walk around looking at people who have turned themselves into commodities.

"Yeah, we're the best batch yet! We're the newest best that has been put out. Well that has to do with that, too. You know I'm, uh, ahm, whaddaya call it, it isn't schizophrenic but it is, oh. what people in the West think of people in the East, you see, meaning that in some instances they think that people are crazy who think multifaceted, that there's many ways of interpreting something. I mean 'em all. I can't say I don't know what my lyrics mean, but I can say that, oh, yeah I know what they mean, but if you call it you stop the flow."

Van Morrison has said that he doesn't know what a lot of his own lyrics, mean and even if Beefheart does, or they mean something different for each of us, I think as with Morrison, occasionally you feel that the voice of some Other just might be speaking through this singer at this particular time, as if he were an instrument picking up messages from...? Doc at the Radar Station. (About the various voices he switches between, often in the same song: "I'll tell you the truth, some of those guys really scare me, that come out at me when I do some things, like 'Sheriff Of Hong Kong,' I never met him before. Or she, I dunno. . . it's like different, uh uh... you see, I don't think I do music, think I do spells.")

Wherever Don Van Vliet gets his rules and messages from, it's rarely the external, socalled rational, I think psychotic "civilized" society we've known and lived in. He chooses to live out of it, mentally and physically, and began trying to escape from it at a very early age: "I never went to school. I wet my pants and my mother came and got me as I was running and I told her that I couldn't go to school because I was sculpting at that time a hell of a lot. That was kindergarten, I think. Itried to jump into the La Brea Tar Pits when I was three, whatever that means. They caught me just in time. I was sc intrigued by those bubbles going bmp bmp. I thought I would find a dinosaur down there. I told my mother when I was three years old - she showed it to me not too long ago, in this baby book in that horrible Palmer Penmanship method of writing that she used, you know that fantastic curlicues type stuff that had everything to do with everything other than what it said, on this old yellow piece of paper it's written out, that if she would stay on one side of the room and I would stay on the other, that we would be friends the rest of our life. I used to lock myself in a room and sculpt when I was like three, five, six."

What sorts of things did you sculpt?

"Oh God, things that I would try to have moved kinetically, try to move these things around. These were my friends, these little animals that I would make, like dinosaurs and. . .I wasn't very much in reality, actually."

Do you feel bad about that?

"No, ! feel good. I was right. The way people treat animals, I don't like it. One of my horrible memories is the great Auk, the fact that it was extinct before I was born. What a beautiful bird."

What were your parents like?

"Pretty banal. They moved me to Mojave, that's where they kept the Japanese-Americans during World War II. They moved me up there to keep me out of a scholarship to Europe for sculpture. They wanted to get me away from all the 'queer' artists. Isn't that awful? Periscopes in the tub, right?"

In this sense, he's still not very much in "reality." His problems with record companies over the years are legendary. Yet he has, somehow, kept on making those amazing albums; just when you've almost given up hope, somebody else comes along and offers him a contract, and he does another one, and it doesn't sell. Jon Landau told me in 1970, when he was my record reviews editor at Rolling Stone: "Grand Funk will be more important to the history of rock and roll than Captain Beefheart. And you can quote me on that." But there are other occasions, like the time I met a young woman in a bar who was not a scenemaker or into avant-rock, and when I asked her what kind of music she liked she said: "This guy I heard named Captain Beefheart. There was just something kind of real sensual and musky about it, I dunno. . .it was different, but I loved it."

Beefheart himself thinks women tend to understand his music better than men, so especially since he can be so elliptically, obscurantistly difficult to pin down in interview and describing his music in prose is kind of like trying to catch the prism of a dragonfly wing and hold it intact in the palm of your hand, I'll talk about his wife. Jan is a young woman of such radiance and wholehearted sincerity that it can be a little stunning at first meeting. Phrases like "earth mother" are too quaint, dreary, way off the mark. She is as active an artist as he and the complexities of her mind are fully up to his moodswings, which can give you jetlag. Which doesn't mean she's the archetypal Great Artist's Nursemaid either - she won't take his shit, and he can be a tyrannical baby at times. Like a lot of us.

Jan helps mightily at broaching some kind of rapprochement communications-wise between this man and the world at large. In other words, she translates. In both directions. You'd see the same thing at the U.N. And if Don is not exactly intoning "Klaatu baraada niktu," he does at times seem almost like a visitor from another planet, or more precisely someone still stunned by his first sight of this one, as I suspect he always will be. Perhaps he just doesn't have those filtering mechanisms which enable most of us to cope with "reality" by blocking out at least 80 percent of it.

According to his set of filters, in-animate objects are alive, and plants and animals share with them the capacity to think as well as feel. Don sees perspicacity in a mesquite, an old broom-handle even. If his lyrics are about anything absolutely, they are about ecology.

You're a painter. In "Run Paint Run Run" are you saying that the paint itself is a conscious entity with a will of its own?

"Yeah! Definitely! Hey, you got it. Yes, it does have a will of its own."

So it's alive.

"I think so. I definitely feel that it is."

Do you generally feel that about the things around you, inanimate objects?

"Um hm. Yeah, I really do. I think they're all alive. Don't you?"

I don't know.

"Come on, you do too."

So how do you and the paint get along?

"Pretty damn good, I'll tell ya. I'm just looking forward to getting enough money to be able to really paint big. I don't wanna paint any littler than five by five. But I'd like to paint twenty by twenty."

Do you and the paint ever have fights?

"Yeah, definitely."

Do you feel the same way about the electric guitar, that when you plug it into the call it's this battle of wills sort of?

"I think so. It'll spit out atcha anything that's out there."

Was that what you were talking about in 'Electricity"?

"Yeah, that had a hell of a lot to do with it. It always seems to come out the way it wants to, y'know."

I think that partially Don anthropomorphises animals and objects as a defence against a human crew who empirical observation has told him are by and large incomprehensible to themselves as well as him, that's when they're not also out to getcha. He's like an Androcles that would chat a spell with Leo but see fangs and claws on a delivery boy. Lacking aforesaid filters, he has devised an elaborate system of checkpoint charlies to keep most of humankind's snoots at bay. This can sometimes be frustrating. His favourite device in the past was to always say some bigtime gonzo Dada non-sequitur ("All roads lead to Coca-Cola" was the first one I ever heard), then look you straight in the eye and insistently enquire: "Do you know what I mean?"

"Yeah, sure, Don, sure!" everybody (except Jan) would always huffnpuff. He is a very charismatic person; a guru, of sorts. He knows how to charm, and has a way of flattering you by asking you all. kinds of questions suggesting real concern. He really means it too, his basic philosophy has always been summed up in the open invitation to share his suddenly brighter sunshine in Trout Mask Replica's "Frownland". But see, that's just it: it was always his sunshine, on another level all these things were and are distancing devices (though he's not nearly as egocentrically defensive as he used to be) and it can be extremely frustrating because no matter how intimate you get with somebody if all they ever say practically is stuff that sounds like it came out of their lingo-tango lyrics (another technique is to ask you to elaborate when you ask a question and then just agree with you) you go home with a tape recorder full of words that mean nothing in particular and the sad hunch that there was something a bit impersonal about this whole affair. I've been told that with Don the best countertactic is to try and pin him down: "Just exactly what do you mean?" But somehow I've never been able to draw that hard a line. The man is too magical. Literally. Once in Detroit I walked into a theatre through the back door while he was onstage performing. At the precise moment I stepped to the edge of the curtains on stage right where I could see him out there haranguing the audience, he said, very clearly, "Lester!" His back was to me at the time. Later he asked me if I had noticed it. I was a little shaken.

The years of what career-oriented folks would file as "failure" have ripened and mellowed Don; like most of us, he's grown up some, albeit perhaps against his will. Once I listened to him rant drunk and bitter all night; now I ask him: "Do you think the music business will ever find you 'commercial,' and do you care?"

"I don't think they ever will," he laughs, "and I don't care. I'm just thankful that an audience is listening to me."

He just lets it turn with the earth, though he was particularly angry in the past when a band he literally taught to play cut some sides on Mercury under his name without even telling him. There are also many of us who think Frank Zappa, with whom he grew up, wouldn't be hock in a spittoon, much less a "composer" (anybody says that certifies themselves a moron), if there had never been a Don Van Vliet on this earth. When Zappa established his Straight Records in 1968, he invited Don to join a carny sideshow which also included the GTO's, Alice Cooper and Wild Man Fischer, producing, or so he was credited, Trout Mask Replica. Hell, it's such a sleeper you can still order it from Warner Comm. That record was four sides, 28 songs cut in two days of the most unparalleled ruckus in the annals of recorded sound. In it, after relatively unfocused albums for Buddah (with whom he even scored a minor hit in '66, "Diddy Wah Diddy") and Blue Thumb, Beefheart and his unearthly looking cabal of spazmo henchmen seemed effortlessly to cook up the sofar still definitive statement on the possibilities for some common ground ("fusion," I believe they called some bath-water quickbuckaroos bearing scant relation a few years later) on which raunch rock, slide-slinging Delta blues and post Coltrane/Shepp/Ayler free jazz might consecrate a shakedown together.

Like almost all of Beefheart's recorded work, it was not even "ahead" of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one. On it, Beefheart, behind a truly scarifying gallery of separate voices, becomes at various times a sagebrush prospector, Jews screaming in the ovens at Auschwitz, greased-back East L.A. pachuco, a breakable pig, automobile, "Ant Man Bee" (title of one song), a little girl and her brinechawed seafarin' aged father (in the same song), a Pa Kettle-mischievous "Old Fart at Play," and several species of floral piscatorial and amphibious life. The band under his tutelage, thereon reinvent from the ground up rhythm, melody, harmonies, perhaps what our common narrow parameters have defined as "music" itself.

Since then he has released seven albums of varying quality. The immediate followup, Lick My Decals Off Baby, was brilliant though a little abrasive even for my ears at the time it was released. 1971's The Spotlight Kid was more commercial though hardly compromised, and many people regard 1972's Clear Spot, a minor masterpiece of sorts, as a dance album in disguise. Two later records on Mercury Unconditionally Guaranteed and BlueJeans and Moon Beams were baldface attempts at sellout. Shiny Beast, a charming but relatively minor work, was re leased by Warner Brothers in 1978. None of these albums has sold more than 50 or 60 thousand, and that's over a long period of time; only Trout Mask and Shiny Beast, in fact, remain in the catalogues.

Perhaps it is the ''success" ("triumph?") of New Wave that has emboldened Warner Brothers. In any case Doc at the Radar Station is one of the most brilliant achievements by any artist in any year. And in 1980 it seems like a miracle. It certainly is not compromised, and I doubt that it will get any radio play in this country at least, but then I said the Clash didn't have a prayer. While some of his self-acknowledged acolytes have gone on to stardom, megabucks, popout lunch boxes, etc., the progenitor remains in his Mojave trailer, where he barely has room for an indoor easel. (So if any neo-Florentine patron is reading this, I will make a plea that Don would never make or ask anyone else to for him: support a real artist.) I'm not sawing violins in half - Don certainly doesn't feel sorry for himself, and in late 1977 when he reappeared at the Bottom Line with a new band and Shiny Beast in the wings, he had the distinct air of a, well, I don't even feel "survivor" is the word. A patriarch, perhaps, a high priest, born again from Ancient Egypt smiling like the spuming headwaters of the Nile, long weathered body holding just that many mysteries, arcane secrets from half-apocryphal texts of hoodoo mojo Coptic canebreak healings of the kind Ishmael Reed likes to dream up.

Next to him, Dr. John looked like Gary Glitter (apologies to Dr John, I’m sure he doesn’t mean it - Graham): all soot, no zoot. He could go 15 rounds brainwave-to-brainwave with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and judges who know nothin' anyway call it a draw. Might be the white Leadbelly. Too much in love with living to be Robert Johnson. In the late '60s, some hotshit young hitpicker got famous by proclaiming that Don Van Vliet, if he wanted to, could be the greatest white blues singer in the world." That would have been dumb as settling for a moosehead over the fireplace when you’ve lassoed the Loch Ness Monster and taken it to dinner, highballs and dancing. Like Van Gogh doing pasteup for Bloomingdale's. Make no mistake, Captain Beefheart is an absolutely authentic hunk of taproot Americana on a Mark Twain level with Paul Bunyan stature.

But today an artist is expected to market him or herself as a commodity to be generally recognised. So in that sense it's no wonder Don retreated to the Mojave outback. On the other hand, the old irret routine doesn't exactly work anymore either. And Don has pretty much been through his phase of living out the artist as Genius/Idiot Savant cliche. On the phone the other day I mentioned Andy Warhol, and Don said, "He soups things up. But isn't it nice, being able to say that we're not like him?" At the time I thought his was a shopworn verbal popper combined with an absolutely childlike attitude: "Isn't it nice, being able to say that we're not like him?" Well, yes, it is, and Mr. Rogers will be here at 3:30. This plus the fact that artists know how much they can get away with, how much we in fact expect of them, can lead to truly sick situations, disastrous for all concerned: "Isn't it nice, being somebody's pet?" I feel like even the word "genius" should be put in quotation marks because the very concept has a way of getting out of hand, like an unruly child. Artists often end up conspiring with their adoring audiences to ensure their own isolation. Once, a very long time ago, I saw Don go sweeping imperiously in and out of hotels until he found one that met his aesthetic specifications, entourage (including me) trailing embarrassedly behind while he wore a cape and doodled on a pad the whole time.

Still, there is something ingenuously natural about him. I don't think, for instance, that he necessarily "tries" to "create" these things, they just sort of happen to (through?) him. In the course of this process, he has managed to practically reinvent both music and the English language. And if you think that's a thorny thicket of defenses to try and hack through so as to get at the actual person back there, you're right. He embarrasses you with his effusiveness; he feels misunderstood and craves desperately to talk with anyone who, he's satisfied, understands what he's trying to do. I don't know why he thinks I understand it. I only understand a little part of it. A lot of it is Sanskrit to me too. But you'll never miss the feeling however obtuse the structure, because this man is almost 100 per cent feeling, can be feverish with it, leads with every open nerveend till sometimes you wonder if he has a mind at all, or just threw the one he had away one day because every pore in the body is a knowing little eye fiercely darting at experience.

Now, there is no reason on earth why such a creature should be articulate. Except that he is. But on his terms, most of the time. And this is what has always bothered me. What good is being an artist, creating all these beautiful things, if you can't just throw down your defenses sometimes and share things on the common level of other people? Without that, it's barren and ultimately pathetic. Ultimately, without some measure of that, it can never matter as art. 'Cause art's of the heart. And I'm talking about the heart that flies between two or more humans, not to the ghost of the great Auk, or a glob of paint, or any of his other little friends. All this week, one song off Trout Mask Replica kept playing in my head: "Orange Claw Hammer," an unaccompanied field holler-like poem about a man who's been away at sea for years and catches first sight of his daughter since she was in swaddling. He grasps her hand and offers to "Take you down to the foamin' brine ‘n water, and show you the wooden tits on the goddess with the pole out full-sail that tempted away your pegleg father. I was shanghaied by a highhat beaver-moustache man and his pirate friend. I woke up in vomit and beer in a banana bin, and a soft lass with brown skin bore me seven babies with snappin' black eyes and beautiful ebony skin, and here it is I'm with you my daughter. Thirty years away can make a seaman’s eyes, a round-house man's eyes flow out with water, salt water."

Now if that isn't pure true American folklore then you can throw everything from Washington Irving to Carl Sandburg and beyond in the garbage. I'm saying Don Van Vliet, "Captain Beefheart," is on that level. But what I realised this morning, the reason why it was this song stuck out from 26 others: because it's not about the "Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish," but something that happened between people.

Why do you almost always talk elliptically?

"Due to the fact that probably it's very difficult for me to explain myself except in music or paint."

But don't you think talking that way all the time is kind of impersonal, a distancing effect?

"It probably comes out very personal in the music. That's where I'm truthful and honest. I don't know how it happens exactly, but my mind becomes the piano or guitar."

What about when you're alone with Jan?

"We don't talk too much. Because we trust each other, and we don't have that much faith in the spoken word. I guess it's true that I do talk selfishly, as a conversationalist."

Well, don't you think you're missing something you might get from other people by being that way?

"Sure, but they usually won't accept me anyway. I'm comfortable talking to you. Not many people seem to have things in common with me. I guess what intrigues me the most is something like seeing somebody wash my windows - that's like a symphony."

But if you and I are friends, and you trust me, we should be able to have a reciprocal conversation.

"We're talking without talking. I mean that in a good sense. We're saying things that can't be put into the tongue. It's like good music.

In the end I'm not sure which of us is right. I am probably unfair in wanting everything so explicitly defined from everybody, demanding the rest of the human race (perhaps especially ironic in the case of artists and musicians) be as verbal or verbose as I am. I can't say that he's wrong in choosing to live out of society, because this society itself doesn't seem to have much of a future, and doesn't seem to care either. A goat and a corporation exec, or most rising young affluent career people around this town for that matter, come up about even conversation-wise, and the goat smells better and is fun to pet so there you are. As for art that deals with human situations, almost none of the art being produced from within the society these days does that, so why pick on Beefheart because he'd rather commune with paints and bats in the fireplace? Certainly he illuminates more about the human heart, and the human groin for that matter, than all these dry dead literati and "minimalist" artists and juiceless composers. As for Don Van Vliet the man, each passing year seems to bring him farther out of defensive obscurantism, measurably more open and trusting, which is really wild in itself because the world around is careening in exactly the opposite direction.

Besides which on another level it's none of my business anyway, except insofar as he chose to make it so. If he is somewhat in retreat, it can be justified on all the levels above and several more I'm sure, besides which who isn't in retreat these days? His kind takes a lot more courage than most, and as. an artist he is so far removed from any kind of burnout that he can't even be called, like I said earlier and like all the Neil Youngs and Lou Reeds who made it from the late '60s to this point relatively intact, a survivor. More like a natural resource. The difference, finally, is that, to use an example by one of his favourite writers, he'll never give us his version of Macbeth. He would rather be the Grand Canyon.

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25.6.09

L'amour chez les fous

By Roger Salardenne, Editions Prima, 1933. Illustrations by Pol Ferjac. Study about love habits among the lunatics in french asylums.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

"...Social scientist Joshua B. Buhs, author of Bigfoot: 'The Life and Times of a Legend' writes Cryptomundo about a connection – tenuous and racist – between Michael Jackson and the world of cryptozoology..."

Social scientist Joshua B. Buhs, author of Bigfoot: 'The Life and Times of a Legend' http://www.amazon.com/Bigfoot-Legend-Joshua-Blu-Buhs/dp/0226079791/ref=ase_cryptozoologi-20/writes Cryptomundo about a:

"…connection – tenuous and racist – between Michael Jackson and the world of cryptozoology.

Jackson’s nickname among the tabloids was Jacko (which conveniently rhymed with wacko).""Jacko was also the name of the supposed young Sasquatch caught in 1884.

Is there a link? I suspect so.

Jocko is a common slang for a monkey or ape. Jacko seems to be a corruption of that word. Jacko worked as a name for a Sasquatch because it made clear the thing–whatever it was, whether it existed or not–was supposed to be understood as an ape.

The same subtle allusion is then built into Michael Jackson’s nickname. He’s an ape, and his association with Bubbles only cements that."~ Joshua B. Buhs, June 27, 2009.(Fair use, for editorial comment; image credit Akira Suemori.)Typical image comparisons found on the Internet between a character in The Planet of the Apes and Michael Jackson.

See “The Story of Jacko” for more details on the 1884 capture story.http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/story-jacko/